We are F%$#ed

The Western Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, and there is little that we can do to stop it:

The collapse of the Western Antarctica ice sheet is already under way and is unstoppable, two separate teams of scientists said on Monday.

The glaciers' retreat is being driven by climate change and is already causing sea-level rise at a much faster rate than scientists had anticipated.

The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet could eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise, devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world. But the researchers said that even though such a rise could not be stopped, it is still several centuries off, and potentially up to 1,000 years away.

The two studies, by Nasa and the University of Washington, looked at the ice sheets of western Antarctica over different periods of time.

The Nasa researchers focused on melting over the last 20 years, while the scientists at the University of Washington used computer modelling to look into the future of the western Antarctic ice sheet.

But both studies came to broadly similar conclusions – that the thinning and melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has begun and cannot be halted, even with drastic action to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

They also suggest that recent accumulation of ice in Antarctica was temporary.

“A large sector of the western Antarctic ice sheet has gone into a state of irreversible retreat. It has passed the point of no return,” Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at Nasa and the University of California, Irvine, told a conference call. “This retreat will have major consequences for sea level rise worldwide.”

It's important to remember what is going on with arctic ice, where the decline has exceeded every reputable prediction, so I would start figure that, along with changes in the Greenland ice fields, we could be looking at 1 meter per decade increase in sea level.

Profiles in Cowardice

Because just screams Democratic Judicial Nominee

Obama's nominee for the district judge in the 11^th circuit, (specifically, the noreth Georgia bench) Michael Boggs, has encountered a lot of resistance from Senate Democrats for his antediluvian attitudes on basically everything.

The latest revelation is that he vowed to oppose gays in the Boy Scouts:

New revelations could create more trouble for President Barack Obama's embattled judicial nominee Michael Boggs.

Boggs, currently a state appeals court judge, apparently ran a staunchly anti-gay campaign for the Georgia state House in 2000. In a flyer from his campaign, obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boggs vowed: "I oppose same sex marriages, I oppose homosexual Boy Scout leaders, and I support voluntary prayer in schools."

He billed himself as "a conservative Democrat with conservative values" who's running on "Christian values," and suggested he'd have more power and influence as a Democrat given that Democrats were in control of the majority.

His voting record on LGBT rights, abortion, the Confederate flag, etc. is all far right, but somehow or other, Obama saw fit to nominate him for a lifetime position on the court.

Un-Dirtyword-Believable

OK, Now We Have a Smoking Gun

Bill Stepien, Chris Christie's former campaign manager has now officially stated that the Governor knew what were going on as it happened:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) told the press that no one on his senior staff had prior knowledge of the plan to close access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September. But a lawyer representing Christie's former campaign manager Bill Stepien now says that was wrong.

The claim was included in a letter sent in early April -- and made public Wednesday -- by attorney Kevin Marino. The letter was sent to Randy Mastro, the high-priced defense attorney who led the governor's internal review of the scandal.

The letter demanded corrections to a report produced by Mastro and his team, which cleared Christie of any role in the scandal. Among Marino's demands: that Mastro retract the portion of the report claiming that Stepien had falsely assured Christie that he had no "prior knowledge of the [GWB] lane realignment."

"[T]he Report itself acknowledges -- albeit obliquely -- that Mr. Stepien advised Governor Christie on December 12, 2013, that he (Mr. Stepien) did have prior knowledge of the lane realignment," Marino wrote, later adding: "When the Governor asked Mr. Stepien directly whether he had prior knowledge of the lane closures, Mr. Stepien truthfully told the Governor that [former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey executive] David Wildstein had come to him with the idea, to which Mr. Stepien responded that Mr. Wildstein would have to run the idea by normal channels in Trenton (i.e. the Governor's Office)."

So I guess that it is going to be a Jeb Bush/Hillary Clinton race in 2016. **shudder**

But Remember, By Law this Vote is Non-Binding

Following an abysmal performance, Chipotle shareholders voted against pay raises for senior executives:

Investors in Chipotle Mexican Grill voted overwhelmingly on Thursday against the company’s executive compensation plans, sending a strong rebuke to a company that had awarded more than $300 million to its co-chief executives in recent years.

More than 75 percent of investors voted against Chipotle’s say-on-pay measure, which asked investors to ratify a compensation plan that would continue such payments to Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder, and his co-chief, Montgomery F. Moran, over the next few years. That was the highest vote against any say-on-pay measure among the country’s largest 3,000 companies this year.

Though the vote is nonbinding, Chipotle said it was taking investor sentiment into consideration.

“We take this very seriously,” a Chipotle spokesman, Chris Arnold, said in a statement. “It has always been, and continues to be, a top priority that our compensation programs are driving the creation of shareholder value. We thank our investors for the feedback we have received on this issue and will continue to engage with our investors as we review our compensation programs that build value for all of our investors.”

Shareholder discomfort with Chipotle’s multimillion-dollar executive compensation plans has grown. At last year’s meeting, 27 percent of shareholders voted against the say-on-pay measure. But in recent months, smaller investors, including the CtW Investment Group, have lobbied big institutional investors to join them in trying to rein in Chipotle’s executive pay.

Note however, this is a non-binding vote.

Binding shareholder votes on executive pay are forbidden by US law.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Letting Bygones Be Bygones

Life is too short to hold on to grudges pic.twitter.com/HNHxLahaAB
— Warren Beckett (@RobotMonsieur) May 16, 2014

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!!

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

7. AztecAmerica Bank, Berwyn, IL

Full FDIC list

Things are definitely slowing down.

So, here is the graph pr0n with last few years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

Your Ukraine Update

We now have some on the ground media reports that make it very likely that US security consultants (mercenaries) are on the ground in the Ukraine:

The leaks may have more truth in them than I had assumed. Paris Match, a well regarded weekly French magazine, investigated the recent incidents in Krasnoarmeysk in east Ukraine where some para-military gang disrupted the vote on more autonomy for the region by killing two supporters of the federalists. It finds photographic evidence that the gang was led by functionary from the fascists paramilitary Right Sektor:

These images show Andrey Denisenko, one of the Pravy Sektor chiefs, among a group of mysterious gunmen that attacked a voting station Sunday in the small town of Krasnoarmeysk, some 60 kilometres from the separatist « capital », Donetsk. After occupying the local town hall for several hours, the militiamen shot down point blank one local civilian, and killed two other unarmed protesters.

These Pravy Sektor thugs were hired for the "special battalion Denjpr" of the newly created "National Guard" and are paid by oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

But there is an even bigger scoop in this story.

Jerome Sessini, an experienced war photographer for Magnum who has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, was in Krasnoarmeysk and made some very interesting observations:

Several witness also said they heard some of the gunmen speaking with strong western Ukraine accents. They also noticed that some of the gunmen appeared to come from the Caucasus area, possibly mercenaries from Chechnya. Other gunmen never spoke a word and seemed foreign to the region. French war photographer Jerome Sessini spent about an hour face to face with the gunmen before they opened fire. « I found that their general attitude and their very precise techniques gave off the impression that they were American mercenaries, or people trained by American mercenaries » said Sessini. « I can’t guarantee this for sure, but I’d give it a 95 per cent, » added the photographer, who frequently interacted with various U.S. security contractors during his years covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A long time ago, when I took part in martial arts competitions, I could tell which dojo my opponents had learned at just by watching their warming up rituals. Someone who's longtime profession is to observe, identify and document people at war should surely be able to categorize special forces he interacted with along the "schooling" and attitude those have.

Also you have to read this essay by Michael Hudson on the underlying motivations for US and EU adventurism in the Ukraine, where asserts the program of destabilization and austerity (austerity being the EU/IMF deal that Yanukovich rejected):

Finance in today’s world has become war by non-military means. Its object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute. In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices. It is what today’s New Cold War is all about. Backed by the IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) as knee-breakers in what has become in effect a financial extension of NATO, the aim is for U.S. and allied investors to appropriate the plums that kleptocrats have taken from the public domain of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet economies in these countries, as well as whatever assets remain.

He then a suggestion of how to fix this:

The cure for a rent-seeking oligarchy is to tax away rent seeking and de-privatize public monopolies. What Ukraine’s kleptocrats have taken (and what foreign investors seek to extract) can be recovered by promoting classical progressive policies taxing land and natural resources, regulating monopolies and providing public infrastructure investment, including a public option for banking and other basic services. That is what drove the U.S. and Western European industrial takeoffs, after all.

When reading Hudson's essay, I realized something:  the role of international finance as a hostile colonizing is not just limited to the former Soviet Union, or 3^rd nations.

When we look at Wall Street, and the City of London, they aren't just business interests who are f%$#ing up our economy.   They are an occupying colonial power all over the world, which while far less mellifluous than Matt Taibbi's term, "Vampire Squid," is a better description.

One only needs to look at things like Timken's Wall Street driven spin off of its steel business (which will eliminate a core competency in its bearing business) to see how the policies of deindustrialization and looting are being applied here.

Wall Street is not just a corrupt and corrupting part of our economy, it is an invading colonial force.

I Think that the FCC Just Kicked the Can Down the Road

After FCC Chairman, and former telco lobbyist, unleashed a bit of a sh%$ storm when he basically proposed ending net neutrality and relying on the kindness of the FCC in the future.

So the FCC punted today:

Federal regulators appear to share one view about so-called net neutrality: It is a good thing.

But defining net neutrality? That is where things get messy.

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to open for public debate new rules meant to guarantee an open Internet. Before the plan becomes final, though, the chairman of the commission, Tom Wheeler, will need to convince his colleagues and an array of powerful lobbying groups that the plan follows the principle of net neutrality, the idea that all content running through the Internet’s pipes is treated equally.

While the rules are meant to prevent Internet providers from knowingly slowing data, they would allow content providers to pay for a guaranteed fast lane of service. Some opponents of the plan, those considered net neutrality purists, argue that allowing some content to be sent along a fast lane would essentially discriminate against other content.

………

The proposal also requests public comments on whether and by how much the commission should tighten regulation of Internet service providers. For example, the commission asks whether it should reclassify high-speed Internet service as a utilitylike application, subject to stricter regulatory controls than now apply, and if it should ban certain practices that might impede consumers from getting equal access to all legal online content through their chosen Internet service provider.

So basically, they proposed a tiered internet with protections that depend on whether or not you get a Bush appointed judge, in which case, you are f%$#ed, and also proposed returning ISPs to the status of telecommunications services, (Title II) which would regulate them as utilities.

I think that the intention here is to hope that the controversy will die down over the next few months months, and then they can go with the telcos and cable companies with less public push-back.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation takes a rather similar view of these developments:

There’s good news: the nationwide outcry against the Federal Communications Commission’s troublesome proposal for new Open Internet rules is clearly having an impact. At a public meeting this morning, commissioners were factoring in questions that—according to previous accounts—weren’t on the table only days ago. The bad news: the FCC still is considering a set of rules that will allow Internet providers to discriminate how we access websites with only vague and uncertain limits, endangering network neutrality and threatening the vibrant growth of the Internet.

We’re still waiting for the full proposal. But according to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s statements at the open meeting, the FCC didn't take pay-to-play "fast lanes" off the table. Paid “fast lane” access fees threaten the engine of innovation that has allowed hackers, startup companies, and kids in their college dorm rooms to make the Internet that we know and love today. We want the Internet to continue to thrive as a platform for innovation and expression; vague rules that bless "pay to play," with ill-defined limits, are not compatible with our vision of an open Internet.

The good folks at the EFF also provide a tool, Dear FCC, to help people make their feelings known during the public comment period.

It turns out that there is one unambiguously good thing in the proposal, the FCC has proposed assigning 3 television channels to unlicensed public use:

While FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s fast-lane/slow-lane net neutrality proposal was taking a beating on all sides (even Wheeler took a few whacks at it), Internet companies sneaked through a huge victory when the agency agreed to set aside up to three channels of TV airwaves for unlicensed use.

That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s something that Google, Microsoft and other tech companies have spent years advocating. In the past, Republican lawmakers have mostly shut down those efforts, saying that billion-dollar tech companies don’t need a freebie.

This time it mostly slid under the radar as Republicans were distracted by net neutrality and upset about proposed bidding restrictions on AT&T and Verizon in the upcoming TV airwaves auction.

Most airwaves can only be used by companies or parties that hold exclusive licenses; unlicensed airwaves can be used by anyone. Wi-Fi networks run on unlicensed airwaves, and tech companies have been trying for years to get more set aside for more powerful Wi-Fi networks.

Internet companies recently got a huge chunk of airwaves set aside for unlicensed use. But they also coveted a channel or two of TV airwaves, which are among the most valuable since signals on those frequencies can go through buildings and travel relatively long distances.

With its move Thursday, the FCC basically created a half-mile public beach in the middle of multimillion-dollar mansions. ………

This is akin to the various white space proposals that have been fought tooth and nail by the wireless firms.

If this survives, it will be an unalloyed good, but unless the pressure is kept up on the FCC about reinstating Title II, we are going to continue to have a overpriced and under-performing broadband services in the United States.

Deep Thought

It is becoming WAY too difficult to distinguish between the mentally ill homeless guys talking to themselves and someone having a conversation on their Bluetooth ear piece.

Posted via mobile.

Saw Blondie on The Daily Show Tonight

They did a new song, and one of their standards, Dreaming,

The performance was good, and Debbie Harry's voice is still good, though she's lost a bit on the high end of her range.

I will note, I just Wikied her, and realized that she is 68, and she is still smoking hot, and still maintains the New Wave attitude that she, and Blondie pioneered.

Queue the Inflation Trolls

The Producer Price Index rose by 0.6% in April:

U.S. producer prices recorded their largest increase in 1-1/2 years in April as food prices surged, in a potential sign inflation pressures may be creeping up.

The Labor Department said on Wednesday its producer price index rose 0.6 percent, the biggest gain since September 2012. That built on a March increase that was nearly as large.

The department revamped it PPI series at the start of the year to include services and construction. Since then, it has been surprisingly volatile, largely because of big swings in prices received for trade services.

Still, economists, who had expected only a 0.2 percent gain, saw the latest rise as an indication that price pressure may be building. Officials at the Federal Reserve have long worried that inflation was running too low.

I will note that the trend for this year is still less than 6%, which is where I would set the target, and it appears that their statistical set is kind of hinky, but expect the inflation gnomes to come out and run around with their hair on fire.

Seriously? Chattanooga has the Best Internet in the Nation?

Actually, yes.

You see,  Chattanooga has a municiplally owned fiber optic network:

For thousands of years, Native Americans used the river banks here to cross a gap in the Appalachian Mountains, and trains sped through during the Civil War to connect the eastern and western parts of the Confederacy. In the 21st century, it is the Internet that passes through Chattanooga, and at lightning speed.

“Gig City,” as Chattanooga is sometimes called, has what city officials and analysts say was the first and fastest — and now one of the least expensive — high-speed Internet services in the United States. For less than $70 a month, consumers enjoy an ultrahigh-speed fiber-optic connection that transfers data at one gigabit per second. That is 50 times the average speed for homes in the rest of the country, and just as rapid as service in Hong Kong, which has the fastest Internet in the world.

………

Since the fiber-optic network switched on four years ago, the signs of growth in Chattanooga are unmistakable. ………

………

EPB, the city-owned utility formerly named Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, said that only about 3,640 residences, or 7.5 percent of its Internet-service subscribers, are signed up for the Gigabit service offered over the fiber-optic network. Roughly 55 businesses also subscribe. The rest of EPB’s customers subscribe to a (relatively) slower service offered on the network of 100 megabits per second, which is still faster than many other places in the country.

Gee.  The private sector, largely unregulated, cable and phone companies deliver what is among the slowest and most expensive internet service in the developed world, and publicly owned providers outperform them.

Maybe it's because the for-profit companies see preserving, and leveraging, their near monopoly status as more ……… well ……… profitable than improving the quality and price service.

Hoocoodanode?

Shorter New York Times, "We Pay Bros More than Ho's"

It was announced today that the New York Times fired Jill Abramson as executive editor.

It appears that this was largely because she complained when she discovered that her pay was significantly less than her predecessor, as well as one of her (male) subordinates:

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson, who spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, had been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, which accounted for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”

Of course, Abramson was good for business, and the paper is "financially beleagered" Sulzberger decided to build a palatial new headquarters for the paper, and use very short term debt to finance this, which required a refinance at junk bond rates from Mexican crony capitalist Carlos Slim, and a sale-leaseback of $¾ million square feet in their headquarters.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. is letting his sense of entitlement show.

This is Good, But I Expect SCOTUS to Overturn it on Corporate "Free Speech" Grounds

The NLRB is considering a ruling that would require that businesses allow their email systems being used for union organizing:

The NLRB has issued a “Notice and Invitation to File Briefs” [PDF] in the Purple Communications, Inc. case which could overturn the precedent concerning organizing activities on company email systems set by the board’s ruling in the Register-Guard case during the Bush Administration.

Using the Register-Guard decision as precedent, companies can currently enforce policies which prohibit company email from being used for anything but business purposes. But the current NLRB appears interested in reversing that decision partially due to the increased importance of email in organizing since the Bush era. Another goal is to align the ruling with other recent rulings that helped streamline the union election process.

This is a good idea, but it is a pro worker idea, so I expect a 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court overruling this on 1^st Amendment grounds.

After all, if the DC, and the 4^th Circuit, Courts of Appeals has already found that a requirement that employers post a notice of labor rights was a violation of the 1^st Amendment, and the increasingly radical right wing of SCOTUS has become fairly explicitly partisan, and sabotaging labor organizing rights is good for the Republican Party.

The World Just Got a Bit Less Disturbing, and a Lot Duller

He first gained notice in the US with this cover for Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Album Brain Salad Surgery

H.R. Giger, the artist best know for designing the Alien for the eponymous film, is dead at age 74.

His work was profoundly disturbing, and brilliant.

The Washington Post has Done the Impossible

In rewriting an OP/Ed contributed by Ramesh Ponnuru, some as yet unamed editor has actually lowered the quality of the indicted right wing pundit's writing.

Speaking to the universal desire of the right wing to excise the memory of Abraham Lincoln from our recent memory, he wrote in the Post that we should go back to calling it Washington's Birthday.  (I am old enough to remember when both Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays were both holidays, and not spot welded together), and some nameless editor at the paper changed his words in a fairly significant way:

“Getting rid of President’s Day would not be difficult. All we would have to do is start calling the third Monday of February by its proper name under federal law: Washington’s Birthday. That’s the practice state governments and advertisers ought to follow.” The version the Post ended up running struck the third sentence and replaced the second with ”All we would have to do is designate the third Monday of February to mark George Washington’s Birthday.”

As an aside, I had a fair number of discussions about the writing business with science fiction author and editor Ben Bova, and noted that when he was editor-in-chief at Omni,^* he had to fire a number of editors who refused to stop rewriting stuff. (He makes a distinction with minor copy edits, and the editor asking for changes from the authors)

Whoever made this change should be fired.  Period.  Full Stop.

^*I am not sure if this was an issue during his stint at Analog Science Fiction, but I got the impression that it was less of an issue, probably because the editors were less likely to be frustrated writer English majors.

Heads they Win, Tails you Lose

Our executive class, Walmart edition:

Sometimes the effects of our social and income inequality are easy to see, but hard to measure.

But not in this case: despite falling revenues, and despite only reluctantly paying minimum wage to its workers, Walmart increased the pay for its top executives. The people who do the labor get little. The people who make the decisions that can cause falling revenues get more (and more and…) Could it be any clearer what is going on?

This is what Thomas Piketty’s theories look like in practice.

………

A key question for detectives trying to figure out who may have committed a crime is to ask cui bono, “Who benefits?” Who stands to profit from a murder, from a crime? That’s often your perp.

In Walmart’s case, it is not its stockholders who profited. Indeed, this has not been a money year for Walmart shareholders. Despite an overall good twelve months for the stock market in general, Walmart stock bumbled due to lower sales growth.

No joy for Walmart’s customers, or its own employees. Walmart cited cuts in federal food stamps as one reason for its weak sales increase. Since they are paid only minimum wage (and Walmart fights vigorously against any increases) and only are given 39 hours a week or less so as not to qualify for full-time benefits, a fair number of Walmart’s own workers receive food stamps.

Good news though for Walmart’s top executives. The company employed some accounting tricks to “adjust” on paper actual revenues to make them appear higher than in reality. On the strength of that “adjusted” performance, William Simon, CEO of Walmart’s United States unit, received total compensation of $13 million last year. Of that, $1.5 million was a “performance bonus,” paid out actually for declining revenues. In fact, six of Walmart’s top executives received a total of $8.42 million in cash incentive payments for 2014 even as revenues fell and the company closed stores. The former employees of those stores, needless to say, did not receive any performance pay bonuses as they fell deeper into poverty.

They don't get it.

They won't get it if they are riding in an oxcart to Madame la Guillotine.

It's Only Metadata, Right?

As David Cole observes, "We Kill People Based on Metadata:

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development.

(Emphasis Mine)

The "signature strikes" that the CIA and Pentagon use are based entirely on metadata.

The next time that you hear of a wedding party being blown-up by a drone, realize that the same thing could happen to you on the basis of your cell phone location data.

The First Rule of Fight Club is ………

Do not piss off Jon Stewart.

That goes for you, Rush Limbaugh:

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With 200-300 school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, and Limbaugh decides to take the side of the terrorists, because Michelle Obama took up their cause.

Stewart is rahter pithy about this:

So that’s our choice: Malala [Yousafzai, who was shot in the face by the Taliban for saying that girls should go to school] or Rush, the quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque superfund cleanup site that was his soul.

Follow the hashtag, "#F*@KYOURUSH".

Magnets How do They F%$#ing Work?

Once again, it's time to roll the Insane Clown Posse video Miracles, (Completely NSFW) because the Talibaptists are going full ICP Here

One of the joys of Neil deGrasse Tyson and his science show Cosmos, is the way that it makes the heads of the primordial wing of the Christian right explode.

Case in point, they have now come out opposing electromagnetism:

If there is one topic in each week’s Cosmos that sends the Christian fundamentalists into a frenzy, it is evolution.

You see, scientists understand that most sciences cannot be done correctly if you ignore the scientific fact of evolution. Yet, week in and week out, creationists critique the job Tyson and his team of writers are doing, calling them speculative and misleading.

Creationists would have you believe that Tyson and his crew are force-feeding viewers a story of evolution dreamed up in the minds of those who simply want to refute God and spread atheism.

Calling evolutionary biologists names such as “evolutionists”—a word not used outside of the creationists sphere—is an attempt to demean the science as nothing more than a religion; ironically, the very thing they are trying to sell you on.

This week’s episode, titled, “The Electric Boy” was about scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday’s study of electricity led to some of the biggest discoveries and inventions in the history of mankind, ranging from the electric motor to the discovery of electromagnetic waves that surround just about everything.

How on earth could creationists be upset with electricity? Well, Tyson had the audacity to mention that Faraday’s discoveries helped us explain how birds navigate the globe using the earth’s electromagnetic waves, and that their brains are evolutionarily wired for such a task.

Seriously. What is wrong with these people, and why do we allow them to breed?

Big Ag Will Kill Us Now

The good folks at I F%$#ing Love Science point us to a study that strongly indicates that neonicotinoid pesticides cause colony collapse disorder in bees:

A new study claims to have pegged neonicotinoids as the definitive cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. But does the data really justify the conclusions?

European honey bees are incredibly important pollinators. Unfortunately, they're disappearing at a rapid rate due to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). What actually causes CCD isn't completely understood. CCD has confused scientists since it was first described, or had its name changed, in 2006. It is likely caused by a number of different factors, working together - however, there has been a large focus on a certain group of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. In December of 2013, in an attempt to mitigate their involvement, the EU implemented a two-year memorandum on three commonly used insecticides in the neonicotinoid family. Many, including their own government, criticized the science behind the moratorium.

There is a desperate need for new studies to accurately test the different variables involved in CCD. New research from Dr. Alex Lu attempts to peg neonicotinoid insecticides as the underlying cause of CCD. The study set up 18 hives to test the effects of two neonicotinoids, clothianidin and imidacloprid, from 2012-2013. Six colonies were selected from three different sites in central Massachusetts, and sublethal doses of each insecticide were given orally to treatment hives via a syrup solution. Six of twelve treated colonies abandoned their hives while only one of the six control hives abandoned theirs. Neonicotinoids obviously do not help bees, but whether this study has found them to be the ‘smoking gun’ isn’t exactly as clear as many are making it out to be. Only 18 hives were used in this study which is too small of a sample size to control for other variables and definitely too small to form a definitive conclusion as to the affects of neonicotinoids. The way he tests for CCD-like symptoms is not a definitive indication that is occurring. Hive abandonment is not automatically CCD. Honey bees may abandon their hives for any number of different reasons, and this study doesn’t control for any of them.

This is why things like pesticides should be proved safe before use, and not allowed until proved they are unsafe, as is the USDA's policy in the United States.

This is a small study, and as such, it should not be the sole basis of regulatory policy, but I do think that this is a good justification to throwing a few million dollars at a larger study, before we lose our almond, avocado, apples, peaches, pears, etc.

Our Friends in the Ukraine are Hiring Blackwater

Guess what? In addition to advising the current government in Kiev, it appears that we have lent them mercenaries from the firm formerly known as Blackwater:

Soldiers from a private US security company with a record of alleged atrocities in Iraq are supporting Ukraine‘s security forces in the volatile east of the country, the German newspaper Bild reported Sunday.

The report, citing Germany‘s federal intelligence agency BND, said 400 of the heavily-armed men employed by the group formerly known as Blackwater were deployed in the vicinity of Lugansk where pro-Russian separatists are seeking self-rule.

The BND declined to comment on the report, while the security company - now known as Academi - dismissed similar reports in March.

Bild reported that according to a BND assessment, US intelligence services had knowledge of the covert involvement of the private soldiers in Ukraine. BND representatives relayed the information to Germany‘s federal chancellory on April 29, Bild said.

Academi was known as Blackwater during its time as key security services contractor to the US government in the war it led to oust Iraq‘s president Saddam Hussein in 2003.

It was later implicated in the killing of unarmed civilians and arms smuggling in Iraq.

This is nucking futs.


I can think of no more inflammatory news than having the most notorious mercenary organization in the real world providing "security consultants" for a government that is already being viewed with suspicion by much of the eastern half of the country.

I think that we have learned that the EU and US don't care about the Ukraine as much as they want to just f%$# with Russia.

This is not going to end well.

H/t R1 at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Yes, I Took Yesterday Off

What can I say?

I miss posting about once a year.

I'm still fine, just lazy.

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeal F%$#s Up Again

In Oracle vs. Google, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal, aka the "Patent Court", has once again taken a delusionally extremist position on IP, and ruled that software APIs are subject to copyright. As Timothy B. Lee observes, "The court that created the patent troll mess is screwing up copyright too."

A few years ago, the database company Oracle sued Google, arguing that Google's Android operating system infringed the copyright of Oracle's Java technology. On Friday, a federal appeals court sided with Oracle in the long-running dispute.


The decision seems to reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of how software works. And it could create serious headaches for companies that want to make their software compatible with that of competitors.

Why did Oracle sue Google?

The lawsuit focuses on technical decisions Google made when it created the Android operating system.

Google wanted people who wrote programs in the popular programming language Java to be able to re-use their code in Android apps. To do that, Google had to ensure that Java code written for other purposes ran exactly the same on Android. But negotiations with the company behind Java, Sun Microsystems (which was later acquired by Oracle), broke down, so Google decided to create its own version of Java from scratch.

………

The trial court judge, William Alsup, sided with Google. Copyright only protects the creative aspects of a work, not its functional characteristics. Judge Alsup ruled that because the names of Java functions was essential to achieving interoperability, they were a functional characteristic rather than a creative aspect of Java, and using them wasn't copyright infringement.

But on Friday, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The court was unimpressed with Google's argument that function names were functional characteristics not protected by copyright. In the Federal Circuit's view, the list of Java functions was just another kind of "code" that couldn't be copied without its creator's permission.

The court's reasoning didn't impress James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at the University of Maryland. "Not only do they not understand how computers work, they can't even read," he says.

………

The Federal Circuit is the court that hears appeals in all patent cases. Over the last three decades, it has shown a consistent bias in favor of patent holders, setting legal precedents that made the current patent troll problem possible.

Ordinarily, copyright cases in California would be heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But because Oracle's fight with Google also includes some patent issues, the Federal Circuit gets jurisdiction.

And evidently, the Federal Circuit has a bias toward copyright holders to go with its pro-patent bias.

Needless to say, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals is completely insane, and should be abolished, and the judges on that court should be told to take up knitting.

It Sucks to be Tom Wheeler

It turns out that the Telco Lobbyist turned FCC Chairman is experiencing a lot of push-back regarding his proposal to gut net neutrality, not individuals, but also from internet giants like Google and other Democratic FCC commissioners:

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposal to let ISPs charge Web services for an Internet fast lane drew condemnation from many net neutrality advocates, and now two members of the commission have expressed doubts about the plan as well.

Jessica Rosenworcel and Mignon Clyburn, the two Democratic members of the commission other than Wheeler, spoke about the chairman's proposal yesterday. In a speech at a gathering of state library agencies, Rosenworcel called for delaying a vote on the proposal:

Network neutrality is the principle that consumers can go where they want and do what they want on the Internet, without interference from their broadband provider. The American Library Association and the library community have long been champions of network neutrality and an open Internet. Libraries, of course, know that an open Internet is important for free speech, access to information, and economic growth. I also support an open Internet. So I have real concerns about FCC Chairman Wheeler’s proposal on network neutrality—which is before the agency right now.

To his credit, he has acknowledged that all options are on the table. This includes discussion about what a “commercially reasonable” Internet fast lane looks like. While I do not know now where this conversation will head on a substantive basis, I can tell you right now I have real concerns about process.

His proposal has unleashed a torrent of public response. Tens of thousands of e-mails, hundreds of calls, commentary all across the Internet. We need to respect that input and we need time for that input. So while I recognize the urgency to move ahead and develop rules with dispatch, I think the greater urgency comes in giving the American public opportunity to speak right now, before we head down this road.

For this reason, I think we should delay our consideration of his rules by a least a month. I believe that rushing headlong into a rulemaking next week fails to respect the public response to his proposal.

The FCC is scheduled to vote on a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on May 15. This would open a new public comment process, but Rosenworcel explained that it would also end the so-called "Sunshine Period," another good opportunity for debate.

………

Also yesterday, dozens of tech companies including Amazon, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo sent a letter to the FCC (PDF) asking the commission to halt any plan allowing payments from Web services to ISPs in exchange for speeding up traffic.

"Instead of permitting individualized bargaining and discrimination, the Commission’s rules should protect users and Internet companies on both fixed and mobile platforms against blocking, discrimination, and paid prioritization, and should make the market for Internet services more transparent," the letter said. "The rules should provide certainty to all market participants and keep the costs of regulation low."

It's still on the agenda for May 15, but I think that it likely that it will be delayed.

There is a groundswell of opposition to this, and if they delay this, I don't think that it will go forward, much in the way that the SOPA/PIPA protests first delayed, then shut down those bills. (For that year anyway)

I do think that this will come back though.

I will say that Wheeler may be the point man, but the only way that this happened is with approval from the White House.

The Cossacks work for the Czar.

Remember the that Miracle Hepatitis B Cure?

You knwo, the one that costs $1,000.00 a pill, Solvaldi?

Well, it turns out that, in addition to being priced at larcenous expensive, the evidence of its efficacy is simply not there:

The German agency performed this assessment based on a dossier submitted by the drug manufacturer (presumably Gilead).  The assessment found some reason to think the drug beneficial, but that the evidence was sparse, left many questions unanswered, and was inadequate to assess the drug for some important patient populations.  At this point, only a summary is available in English.  It includes links to further information in German.

………

Thus the assessment concluded that the drug company dossier included at best irrelevant data that it tried to pass off as important, and inexplicably left out other data that might have been relevant.

………

Summary

It is even bloodier money if the assumption that the drug is a "well-tolerated and effective cure," which  Dr Huyler held, proves not to be true.  It is clear that most of the money that Gilead is now scooping up in the US is not to pay retrospectively for research and development or drug production. Instead, it seems likely to be supporting marketing, public relations, some investors' profits, and huge executive compensation.  When the public realizes that the money may not be buying miracles, the outrage should increase.  

The Sovaldi case is a signal example of how our health care system is awash in marketing hype and public relations buzz that has swamped rational skeptical thinking about logic and evidence.  That marketing and PR is ever enriching managers while it will send the rest of us, health care professionals included, to the poor house.  And all the money we spend will not buy us the promised miracles and triumphs.

True health care reform would revisit the pact society once made with drug, biotechnology and device companies meant to promote reasonably priced innovation, but now promoting oligarchy; support transparency and honesty in clinical research; and challenge how health care managers can make millions or billions from unproven, and sometimes worthless or dangerous products.

It also turns out that the study was not double blind.

So the wonder drug may not be any more effective than existing drugs, and it costs a lot more.

So Not Shocked

The claims by people like Art Laffer, and organizations like ALEC, that "pro business" policies produce an improving economy are not only wrong, but actually counter to the data which shows that the tax-cutting, rich fellating policies that they endorse actually make economic performance worse:

Conservative economic pundits just love to justify "business-friendly" policies to state governments as keys to job growth, which after all is the whole ballgame in economic policy-making.

As Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin has now shown, the problem is that pro-business policies don't really contribute to economic growth. They just make the rich richer, which is not the same thing at all.

The index measures 15 state policy "variables," such as top marginal income tax rates, property taxes, public employees per capita, state minimum wage, right-to-work law, and whether there's an estate tax. You can guess what a state has to do to rank high in all these factors and therefore shine in the index--low taxes, small government, anti-union policies, no estate tax are virtual requirements.

But does a high ALEC ranking translate into high growth? That's the question Chinn asked. He started by measuring private nonfarm job growth in four states--California, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Minnesota--dating to January 2011, when all four got new governors. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Sam Brownback of Kansas were extremely ALEC-friendly, Jerry Brown of California and Mark Dayton of Minnesota were not.

………

Indeed, when Chinn mapped the ALEC rankings for all 50 states against their economic growth, he found that, if anything, a higher index score correlates with a worse economic performance. That won't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the ALEC follies over time: The Iowa Policy Project found the same negative correlation in 2012.

Of course, much like Trotskyites, conservative Chicago School-type economists, and rich parasites, are impervious to the facts, so it is unlikely that this will translate into actual policy.

H/t Kevin Drum.

It's Jobless Thursday!

Initial claims are down for the first time in 4 weeks, to 319K, with the 4-week moving average rising, and continuing claims falling.

Not were what it means, with various holidays and spring break making the past few weeks kind of hard to draw a bead on.

Linkage

• Programming Sucks (Still Drinking) A good essay on why your software just crashed.
• British Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged to Play in NSA's Data Pools (The Intercept) Guess what, the British signals intelligence was salivating about getting access to the NSA data.
• Exclusive: Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA (Al Jazeera America) Don't be Evil, My Ass
• How The US Gov't Destroyed The Lives Of A Muslim American Man's Entire Family After He Refused To Become An Informant (Crooks and Liars) Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

The most comprehensive model of the Big Bang yet:

I Have Mixed Emotions About This

In response to American sanctions, the Russian Duma passed legislation, ostensibly to secure the actions of foreign bankers.

The result is that the Russian government is now demanding that Visa and Mastercard make a security deposit equivalent to 2 days worth of transactions, $3.8 billion, to continue to operate in the country:

International credit card companies face a "severe impact" on their operations in Russia following a strict new law Moscow has adopted in response to Visa and Mastercard freezing service to banks under US sanctions.

Visa described the regulations as "unprecedented" and Mastercard said it could experience difficulties, the Russian magazine Snob reported, after Vladimir Putin signed a law on Monday to create a rival national payment system.

The law stipulates the creation of a homegrown system to facilitate cashless transactions by 1 July, but also imposes stiff new requirements on international payment systems operating in Russia.

The legislation was spurred on by Visa and Mastercard's decision on 21 March to stop servicing payments for clients of Rossiya Bank, as well as its daughter company Sobinbank. Rossiya Bank was included in the first round of US sanctions over the Ukraine crisis because it is owned by Putin associate Yury Kovalchuk and is the "personal bank for senior officials of the Russian Federation," the US Treasury said when announcing the sanctions.

Visa and Mastercard also blocked operations for cards issued by SMP Bank, which is owned by the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who are old judo buddies of Putin's.

The new law forbids international payment systems from cutting off services to Russian clients and obliges them to base their processing centre in Russia. To ensure their good behaviour, international operators will have to place a security deposit in Russia's central bank equal to the average value of two days' worth of transactions.

Visa and Mastercard together processed $1.9bn (£1.12bn) in transactions per day last year – 90% of all cashless payments in Russia – equal to a $3.8bn security deposit, the Moscow Times reported.

The security deposit will be due in eight quarterly payments starting on 1 July. The law states that if a payment system unilaterally freezes operations for a Russian client, it is liable for a fee totalling 10% of its security deposit for each day without service.

The credit cards are caught between a rock and a hard place, they have to deal with both US and Russian law, which sucks for them, but they are credit card companies, which means that they spend their time giving people sh%$ sandwichs, so the fact that they are dining on excrement between two slices of white bread, it amuses me no end..

Like I said, mixed emotions.

I'm Not Sure What it Means, but It Sounds Promising

Vladimir Putin has suggested that any referendum on autonomy/secession for the eastern Ukraine be delayed:

The Kremlin beat a tactical retreat over a regional referendum following days of soaring tension that have left dozens dead and fed fears of a civil war in Ukraine.

Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, said the referendum being staged by pro-Russia separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine on Sunday should be postponed. If the referendum goes ahead, it will provide an argument for the region joining Russia as happened in Crimea in March.

Overt Russian support for the plebiscite could have triggered more substantive EU and US sanctions against Russia. Putin's statement, following talks with the president of Switzerland in Moscow, looked likely to delay the imposition of a harsher round of economic penalties.

While Moscow has also opposed the holding of presidential elections in Ukraine on 25 May – a ballot strongly supported by the west – Putin sounded more conciliatory, saying that the poll could be a step in the right direction.

The Russian leader insisted, however, that a presidential election should be preceded by constitutional changes in Ukraine aimed at federalising the country and handing greater powers to the regions, steps that would favour greater Russian influence over eastern Ukraine after the Kremlin annexed Crimea.

I don't know what it means, but it is rather telling the first time that I've seen a statement, from either side that seems to be the slightest bit directed toward a deescalation.

With Obama sounding intensely bellicose, and John Kerry channeling General Jack Ripper from the movie Dr. Strangelove, it appears that Putin is the adult in the room.

We live in Bizarro World.

Moar Katnip, or the Dog Gets It!

I could see RP the Cat doing this.

Make it Stop!!!!

Crap. Monica Lewinsky is back, and Dick Cheney's wife is suggesting that it's some sort of Clinton plot.

Kill me.

Just kill me.

Is Scalia Phoning it in, Senile, or Maybe Being Gaslighted?*

In a recent dissent on an environmental regulation case, EPA v. EME Homer City Generation, L. P., Antonin "Fat Tony" Scalia completely mischaracterized a precedent from the last decade, Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc. in 2001.

It is even more bizarre, because Scalia wrote the unanimous decision that he so grossly mischaracterized:

………

Legal experts say Justice Antonin Scalia erred in his dissent in the 6-2 decision Tuesday to uphold the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate coal pollution that moves across state lines. The Reagan-appointed jurist argued that the majority's decision was inconsistent with a unanimous 2001 ruling which he mistakenly said shot down EPA efforts to consider costs when setting regulations.

"This is not the first time EPA has sought to convert the Clean Air Act into a mandate for cost-effective regulation. Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457 (2001), confronted EPA's contention that it could consider costs in setting [National Ambient Air Quality Standards]," Scalia wrote in his dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

The problem: the EPA's position in the 2001 case was exactly the opposite. The agency was defending its refusal to consider cost as a counter-weight to health benefits when setting certain air quality standards. It was the trucking industry that wanted the EPA to factor in cost. The 9-0 ruling sided with the EPA. The author of the ruling that Scalia mischaracterized? Scalia himself.

The conservative justice's error was noted by University of California-Berkeley law professor Dan Farber, who called it "embarrassing" and a "cringeworthy blunder."

"Scalia’s dissent also contains a hugely embarrassing mistake. He refers to the Court’s earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that’s exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted," Farber wrote on the environmental law and policy blog Legal Planet. "This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it's a cringeworthy blunder."

Doug Kendall, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal legal advocacy group, said the error was mystifying and very unusual for a Supreme Court justice.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and seeing that I do not have much in the way of legal chops,^† I didn't really have much to add, until I read Salon's followup on this snafu, and this line, from noted Attorney Dan Farber jumped out:

Scalia’s dissent also contains a hugely embarrassing mistake. He refers to the Court’s earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that’s exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted. This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder.

[NOTE: After this was posted, the opinion on the Court's website was revised to eliminate Scalia's error. Of course, as corrected, the case no longer fits Scalia's overall thesis of the "unelected officials" trying to override Congressional policy.]

(emphasis original)

Think about the sentence, "Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder."

I can see a clerk, either one of his own, or that of another justice, experiencing Scalia up close, and deciding that he's lost it, and then giving Tony a little shove out the door.

It's not much, but you can bet that people in the legal world are wondering if Scalia suffered a small stroke or something, and this will adversely affect reputation.

I think that some of his friends might start suggesting that it is time for him to retire.  After all, he'll never be Chief Justice.

Certainly, I believe that his brain has been damaged by overexposure to bile for years.

^*A way of subtly psychologically torturing someone to make them doubt their sanity.
^†I'm an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!^‡
‡I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

Here is Something to Fill You With Dread………

The Obama administration is proposing adding "papers, please" to the web:

A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. The New York Times described it at the time as a "driver's license for the internet."

Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.

Next month, a pilot program of the "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" will begin in government agencies in two US states, to test out whether the pros of a federally verified cyber ID outweigh the cons.

………

To start, there's the privacy issue. Unsurprisingly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately pointed out the red flags, arguing that the right to anonymous speech in the digital realm is protected under the First Amendment. It called the program "radical," "concerning," and pointed out that the plan "makes scant mention of the unprecedented threat such a scheme would pose to privacy and free speech online."

And the keepers of the identity credentials wouldn't be the government itself, but a third party organization. When the program was introduced in 2011, banks, technology companies or cellphone service providers were suggested for the role, so theoretically Google or Verizon could have access to a comprehensive profile of who you are that's shared with every site you visit, as mandated by the government.

Post-NSA revelations, we have a good sense for the dystopian Big Brother society the EFF is worried about. As the organization told the Times, at the least "we would need new privacy laws or regulations to prohibit identity verifiers from selling user data or sharing it with law enforcement officials without a warrant."

First, we need to be clear that the NSA would use this to track users whether or not they can get the rubber stamp FISA court to approve.

We know that they will, because that is what they do.

Second, to paraphrase Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith, PhD, any technology that the government can create will be duplicated by criminals, or the Chinese, or the Russians, or the Koch brothers.

The depressing thing is that I don't think that Republicans have enough outrage left after, Bengazi! Bengazi! Bengazi!, and the Democratic establishment won't challenge the US state security apparatus, at east not while one of their own is running it.

I hope that this goes the way of the Clipper chip, but I would not bet on this.

Not Dredd Scott Bad, but Maybe Plessy v. Ferguson Bad

In a 5-4 vote the Supreme Court just ratified sectarian prayer at government meetings:

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that legislative bodies such as city councils can begin their meetings with prayer, even if it plainly favors a specific religion.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Christian prayers said before meetings of an Upstate New York town council did not violate the constitutional prohibition against government establishment of religion; the justices cited history and tradition.

“Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this Nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond the authority of government,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court’s conservative majority.

The ruling reflected a Supreme Court that has become more lenient on how government may accommodate religion in civic life without crossing the line into an endorsement of a particular faith. All nine justices endorsed the concept of legislative prayer, with the four dissenters agreeing that the public forum “need not become a religion-free zone,” in the words of Justice Elena Kagan.

But there was sharp disagreement after that, and the majority ruling could encourage public bodies to give more leeway to religious expression in their ceremonial prayers and less deference to the objections of religious minorities.

The court’s five conservatives said legislative prayers need not be stripped of references to a specific religion — the prayers at issue often invoked Jesus Christ and the resurrection — and said those given the opportunity to pray before legislative meetings should be “unfettered” by what government officials find appropriate.

It is stupid, petty, small minded, and bigoted ruling.

I'm disappointed, but not particularly surprised.

I will say the fact that the bigotry-deaf Kennedy is now the "moderate vote" on the court.

The Definition of a Good Journalist………

When I muse on the difference between a journalist and a stenographer, I can think of no better example than Jason Mojica's paean to Mohammed Fahmy, Jailed Al Jazeera Journalist Is Actually Kind of a Dick:

This may surprise you, but Mohammed Fahmy, the imprisoned Al Jazeera English journalist who on Friday was awarded the World Press Freedom Award, is actually kind of a dick.

And I’m sure he feels the same way about me.

A couple of years before he and his colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed were arrested in Cairo and accused of running a terrorist cell from their rooms at the Marriott, I worked with Fahmy on a story I produced for VICE News. It was July 2011 and the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak earlier in the year hadn’t brought the sea change that Egyptians were hoping for. Protesters were expected to return to Tahrir Square in what was being dubbed, “Egypt’s Second Revolution.” The very short version of this story is that we were having trouble getting all of the elements of the story we were after when we met Fahmy who offered his services as a fixer. Now, we already had a fixer in Cairo, but I was willing to try anything at that point, so I hired Fahmy for a day to see what he could do. He delivered, but he didn’t gel with me and my crew. At the end of a very long day of shooting, we were happy to part ways.

………

He ran the story, names and all, which pissed me off. We traded shitty BBMs [Blackberry Messenger] back and forth, and I came away thinking of him as a pushy, bull-headed bastard who cared more about getting a story out than for the people who that story was about.

In other words, a damn good journalist.

Journalists are people whose jobs it is to find out things that people don’t necessarily want them to find out. That often requires a type of aggression and self-righteous determination that rubs people the wrong way. And that’s one of the reasons we need to change the way we talk about press freedom.

While we like to lionize journalists as noble truth seekers serving the public good, for those on the other side of their aggressive reporting, they are a f%$#ing nightmare. So when journalists get detained, our knee-jerk moral indignation means f%$#-all to the people who see those journalists as a threat. Wagging our finger at them in the hope that they’ll suddenly come around to our way of thinking is naïve.

(%$# mine)

Reporters are supposed to be a pain in the ass.

When reporters become accepted members of polite society, they become eunuchs in the court of the Sultan.  (See Woodward, Robert)

They are supposed to be unsuited for polite society.

Chaos is Job Won!*

What a surprise. After a decades long assault from the right wing, and an increasingly hostile judiciary, the bigots have managed to re-segregate our public schools:

For decades, federal desegregation orders were the potent tool that broke the back of Jim Crow education in the South, helping transform the region's educational systems into the most integrated in the country.

Federal judges, often facing down death threats and violence, blanketed Southern states with hundreds of court orders that set out specific plans and timetables to ensure the elimination of racial segregation. Federal agencies then aggressively used the authority of the courts to monitor hostile school systems, wielding the power of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to strip federal dollars from districts that refused to desegregate.

The pace of the change wrought by the federal courts was breathtaking. In 1963, about 1 percent of black children in the South attended school with white children. By the early 1970s, the South had been remade — fully 90 percent of black children attended desegregated schools. Court orders proved most successful in the South, but were also used in an attempt to combat de facto segregation in schools across the country, from New York to Michigan to Arizona.

Today, this once-powerful force is in considerable disarray.

A ProPublica examination shows that officials in scores of school districts do not know the status of their desegregation orders, have never read them, or erroneously believe that orders have been ended. In many cases, orders have gone unmonitored, sometimes for decades, by the federal agencies charged with enforcing them.

At the height of the country's integration efforts, there were some 750 school districts across the country known to be under desegregation orders.

Today, court orders remain active in more than 300 districts. In some cases, that's because judges have determined that schools have not met their mandate to eliminate all vestiges of segregation.

But some federal courts don't even know how many desegregation orders still exist on their dockets. With increasing frequency, federal judges are releasing districts from court oversight even where segregation prevails, at times taking the lack of action in cases as evidence that the problems have been resolved.

………

Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has sharply curtailed the power of parents to challenge racial inequities in schools. Districts not under court orders are largely prohibited from considering race to balance schools. And parents in these districts must show that school officials are intentionally discriminating when they make decisions that adversely affect black and Latino students.

And so, as desegregation orders are ignored, forgotten or lifted, black parents are losing the ability to effectively challenge school inequality.

Over the course of months, ProPublica has compiled the nation's most comprehensive and accurate data on active desegregation orders. We used legal databases, academic studies and contacted more than 160 school districts across the country.

This is not an accident.

Between the Republican Party's embrace of segregation for political success, and the Democratic Party's cowardly unwillingness to enforce the law to placate people who will never for then, we are back to separate and unequal.

^*H/T Trit on the Stellar Parthenon BBS for that quote.

Welcome to the 3rd World America.

The rate of maternal deaths in the United States has neary doubled since 1990:

Maternal deaths related to childbirth in the United States are nearly at the highest rate in a quarter century, and a woman giving birth in America is now more likely to die than a woman giving birth in China, according to a new study.

The United States is one of just eight countries to see a rise in maternal mortality over the past decade, said researchers for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in a study published in The Lancet, a weekly medical journal. The others are Afghanistan, Greece, and several countries in Africa and Central America.

The researchers estimated that 18.5 mothers died for every 100,000 births in the U.S. in 2013, a total of almost 800 deaths. That is more than double the maternal mortality rate in Saudi Arabia and Canada, and more than triple the rate in the United Kingdom.

The study was the latest to underscore a steep rise in pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. since at least 1987, when the mortality rate was 7.2 per 100,000 births. The U.S. experienced a sharp spike in 2009 that the Centers for Disease Control attributed to the H1N1 influenza pandemic. The rate has dipped slightly since then, said Nicholas Kassebaum, the lead physician in the University of Washington study, but it remains stubbornly high.

The increase is in stark contrast to most other countries that have had notable decreases, including many in east Asia and Latin America, the report said. The United States now ranks 60 for maternal deaths on a list of 180 countries, down markedly from its rank of 22 in 1990. China, by contrast, is up to number 57.

The reasons for the rise in the maternal deaths in the U.S. are not entirely clear, but several factors seem to be in play.

The article to go on about diabetes, obesity, etc., but makes not a single mention of the rise in equality and the increasing incidence of extreme poverty.

Note that this sort of decline in wellness and life expectancy for the population was presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We are in the process of destroying ourselves.

What We Just Did Today

2014 Grand Mediocre East Coast Champion, Art, People’s Choice, Marine Posse Favorite: Tick Tock the Croc

Natalie and Charlie participated into the 2014 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race as members of the Lansdowne High School team.

Charlie and Natalie part of the support crew, and learned to ride a bike as a result (Natalie has still not mastered this skill).

It covers 14 miles over 8 hours, an obstacle course, and a short jaunt into Baltimore harbor.

The team won an award for most "epic" water entry (about 3:30 into the attached video, assuming that it is ever done processing on Youtube).

Much fun was had by all, though I think that Charlie might be a bit sore in the morning.

Apologies for the poor camera work, both on the vid, and the attached slide show.

Gaah!!!!

I just spent the better part of three f#@&ing hours fixing an esoteric server problem with the Verizon SMTP servers that read bedeviling my wife's email program (Eudora).

We are talking in the weeds bulsh#@ port numbers and authentication settings.

I knew that one would work, but the permutations are a mind f#@$.

My gears us that someone retaken the thing because of Heartbleed.

FWIW, it was an SMTP server of smtp.verizon.net, authentication on, SSL/TLS on, port 465.

Shoot me now.

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And Our Economic Clusterf%$# Continues

First, initial unemployment claims unexpectedly rose, and then the 1^st quarter GDP growth number came in with an anemic 0.1% annual growth rate, though the Federal Reserve still saw fit to continue its taper of quantitative easing.


Seriously, with inflation at next to nothing, and long term unemployment a plague, and everyone is worried about non-existent inflation.


Bah.

He's Back………

Rob Ford is in yet another crack smoking video.

The writers for The Daily Show must be high fiving themsleves right now.

Also, it looks like Ford will be taking a leave from his position as Mayor of Toronto to do rehab.

Not the Onion

The energy company Kinder Morgan is arguing for putting an oil pipeline through an environmentally sensitive area because oil spills can be good for the economy:

That's according to a 15,000 page application Kinder Morgan has submitted to the National Energy Board for the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (a document so large that it "stands over two metres tall and fills 37 binders").

In a section of the application dedicated to the risks and effects associated with oil tanker traffic and the possibility of oil spills, Kinder Morgan finds that "spills can have both positive and negative effects." In particular, "spill response and clean-up creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and clean-up service providers."

Great googly moogly!

As Charlie Pierce observed, this is on a par with a parent murderer asking for for mercy as an orphan.